Let’s Talk About Tolkien, and the Exhausting Debate Over Middle-earth

Personal Essay

Let’s Talk About Tolkien, and the Exhausting Debate Over Middle-earth

the modern race debate in Middle-earth through book lore, production facts, and the trap of tokenism

Photo by Amandine BATAILLE on Unsplash

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Every time a new trailer for a fantasy adaptation drops, the entire internet loses its mind. Lately, the target has been J.R.R. Tolkien. With the release of modern adaptations like Amazon’s The Rings of Power, we’ve been flooded with claiming Middle-earth is “too white,” followed by purists defending the original lore.

Recently, the discourse took a weird turn. People started pointing out that many of the stunt actors playing Orcs and Uruk-hai in Peter Jackson’s original trilogy were Māori or Polynesian. The hot take? “Look, the heroes are all white, but the faceless monsters are played by people of color. Hollywood racism at its finest.”

It’s a flashy argument for social media, but if you actually open the books and look at how Tolkien built his world, the “Tolkien was just a racist white guy” narrative completely falls apart.

The “Mythology for England” Problem

To understand Middle-earth, you have to understand why Tolkien sat down to write in the first place. He wasn’t trying to write a reflection of 20th-century multicultural London. He was a linguist who was genuinely sad that England didn’t have its own grand, ancient mythology.

In one of his famous letters (Letter No. 131), Tolkien openly expressed this frustration, writing that he was:

“…dismayed by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil)… There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, and Germanic, and Scandinavian, and Finnish… but nothing English.”

So, he decided to build one from scratch. He called it a “Mythology for England.”

Because he was channeling the ancient, pre-industrial roots of Northwestern Europe (think Anglo-Saxon and Celtic history), the core characters in the West of Middle-earth naturally fit that specific geography. Demanding that a mythos based on ancient European folklore look like a modern, diverse metropolitan city is a classic case of judging the past by today’s standards — forcing our current social views.

What the Books Actually Say

Here’s the thing: Tolkien’s world wasn’t actually a monolith of pale faces. You just have to read past the surface.

Tolkien tied his world-building strictly to geography. The Shire is basically based on Oxford, meaning the people there are pale. But as you travel south toward Harad (Middle-earth’s equivalent of North Africa and the Middle East), the people are described as swarthy and dark-skinned. Even among Hobbits, Tolkien explicitly wrote in the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring that the Harfoots – the most common branch of Hobbits were “browner of skin.”

And while the dark-skinned Haradrim did fight for Sauron, Tolkien didn’t write them as cartoonish villains. Through Samwise Gamgee’s eyes in The Two Towers, we see a profound moment of empathy as he looks at a fallen Southron soldier. Tolkien beautifully writes:

“He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace…”

This isn’t the work of a man obsessed with racial supremacy; it’s the writing of someone who understood the tragic, universal humanity shared by all cultures caught in the gears of war.

The Orc Casting “Controversy” is Just Logistics

So, what about the Māori stuntmen playing Uruk-hai? Is it a subconscious racial bias?

Not even close. It’s just basic film logistics.

Peter Jackson shot his trilogies in New Zealand. To film massive, brutal battle scenes, the production needed hundreds of big, athletic stunt performers who could handle rough, intense battle scenes. The local Māori and Polynesian communities have a rich culture of physical martial arts and war dances (like the Haka), making them perfect for the heavy action sequences.

Photo by Christopher Stites on Unsplash

For these Kiwi actors, being part of the biggest film trilogy in history wasn’t some kind of Hollywood racism – it was a massive source of local pride and a huge career boost. Turning a practical casting choice in New Zealand into an American-centric racial debate is incredibly tone-deaf.

Enter The Rings of Power: The Modern “Fix” That Backfired

This brings us to Amazon’s The Rings of Power. The show was heavily marketed as the progressive, diverse antidote to Peter Jackson’s “too white” trilogy. For the first time, we saw Black Elves (Arondir), Black Dwarves (Princess Disa), and Black Harfoots.

So, why did this “groundbreaking” casting cause such a massive backlash, while Peter Jackson’s homogenous cast is still universally loved?

It wasn’t because fantasy fans are inherently allergic to seeing Black actors. Tolkien’s world is beloved because its world-building is so logical and detailed. In The Rings of Power, Amazon presented us with remote, medieval-style hamlets that somehow mirrored the diverse look of a 21st-century metropolitan city. By doing so, they completely broke the internal logic of a world where places are meant to be isolated and far apart.

If Amazon actually wanted to champion diversity, they didn’t need to race-swap Elves. Tolkien already gave them Harad and Rhûn – vast, unexplored lands to the South and East inhabited by dark-skinned peoples. Instead of writing a rich, epic storyline about Black warriors and kings fighting Sauron’s influence on their own home turf, Amazon opted for a simpler path: inserting actors of color into existing roles rather than expanding the rich, diverse territories Tolkien had already established.

The Tokenism Trap

What this whole debate really exposes is Hollywood’s current obsession with “tokenism.”

When a studio makes a film set in ancient Japan (like Shogun) or historical Africa (like The Woman King), we demand it stays true to the culture. No one complains that there aren’t enough white or Black actors in a Samurai film because we respect the roots of the story. Yet, when it comes to European mythology, that same respect for cultural roots is often compromised in favor of modern industry standards.

Placing actors of color into roles originally conceived within a specific European folklore doesn’t always translate to genuine representation. Instead, it can feel like a surface-level shortcut.

Photo by Elizabeth Falconer on Unsplash

If the entertainment industry truly wants to champion diversity, the goal shouldn’t be reframing existing European myths, but rather investing heavily in big-budget epics based on rich African, Asian, or Indigenous mythologies. There is a whole world of incredible, diverse legends waiting to be told. Let’s celebrate and elevate those unique stories on their own terms, rather than just adjusting the margins of someone else’s heritage.

©️Dita Indradi 2026 • All rights reserved.

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